The thing is: In 2012, some disgruntled tropers made a rip of the whole site and uploaded it to a torrent, where we found it.

Some time after that, we found said rip, downloaded it and started to work on a better trope wiki.

Since then, we converted the wiki code and experimented a bit with it.

As soon as we had dissected the old wiki pages into individual examples, we made a statistic of the ~3 million examples: Which example texts are most common? If you know Tv Tropes, you may know that they have a problem with "Zero Context Examples", where people write something like "episode 23" or "subverted" or a common name, or nothing at all. Which isn't helpful.

It was obvious that the empty string would be the most common text. Originally we had thought that all/most examples with, say, more than 10 repetitions would qualify as Zero Context Examples.

Turned out the limit is lower: Even of those examples which appear just twice in the whole corpus, most were indeed without context. That's when we had the Eureka Moment.

So yes, Randall's concept doesn't just work for forum posts, but also for wiki examples (that is, if we're talking about wikis which have a similar structure, with tropes having example lists of works and vice versa).